Kiwi.com about their community

Updated: May 4

We asked Ladislav Vasek and Jiri Necas, Community coordinators at Kiwi.com, about their experience and lessons learned from community building. They share with us which KPIs are important for their community, how they increase engagement and much more!

What does "community" mean to you?

For us, it’s bringing people together and providing them with opportunities of sharing their experience, following the latest tech trends and connect people with the same interests. All in all, it’s an advanced way of networking. You connect with others and build relationships with them, find new opportunities for yourself and for others and push the technology ecosystem to the new level.

Specifically, the code.kiwi.com community are mainly tech fans around Kiwi.com. People who are interested in programming, UX, product management or any other tech field, like our activities and events and ideally want to join Kiwi.com one day.

Why is community important for your company?

It helps us create a talent pool. This way we are able to bring smart people closer to the company, connect them with our colleagues and ideally, invite them to join them in our efforts to make travel better. Also, it helps us engage our internal community that can benefit from it. They can meet interesting people, develop their skills, such as public speaking and knowledge sharing, extending their networking size and build their personal brand.

What do you do to increase engagement within your community?

Mainly we organize events — meetups, hackathons, educational weekends, and conferences. However, we also do online competitions and challenges, support open-source teams and other stuff. We’re doing our best in providing the community with valuable content that develops their skills and attracts talented and curious people closer to us.

What numbers do you follow? Which KPIs are the most important for you?

Since we’re focused on hiring, we’re looking at the number of contacts we can provide to our HR. However, the number of our followers on social media and newsletter subscribers are not less important.

Some of the number we managed to meet last year are here:
91% of new hires for Engineering department knew the code.kiwi.com channels

15% of new hires for Engineering department stated that the code.kiwi.com activities were their first point of contact

700+ unique people wanted to be contacted by our HR

What is most challenging in your role as a community manager?

Put our ego aside. Especially when organizing an event you need to double check that you are doing what the community wants, not what you think is the best. Afterall, we’re doing if for them.

What tools do you use to interact with your community online?

We use social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, we organize events through Eventbrite and Facebook events, upload talks from our events to our Youtube channel and we write our own blog, but mainly we are sending a monthly newsletter with useful tips for upcoming events.